The Second Brother
by AmazingGraceless
Summary: Susan muses on her family's death, their relations to the legendary Peverells, and the mistakes they made— and when they didn't.


**AN**: QFL prompt: "We're a clumsy family, we make mistakes." Russel Howard

Wordcount: 1,028

* * *

"We're a clumsy family," Amelia once told Susan. "We make mistakes."

They were standing in front of the Bones Family plot. The graves were endless, stretching out as far as the eye could see in an eternally compressed meadow outside the old Bones manor by the sea. Some of the graves were so old that time had erased the inscriptions on the stones, leaving names and causes of death lost for all time.

Based on the number of graves, and the causes inscribed upon them, Susan noticed that her family had made a great many mistakes.

_Lilith Bones— 1867-1885_

"_Died by her own spell."_

_Eraphim Bones— 1672–1710_

"_He should not have added an erumpent horn to his cure for dragon pox."_

_David Bones— 1789-1809_

"_Really, Davy, you should have known better than to get entangled with pirates."_

The list went on and on. Most in her family, proud descendants of the great Peverells, were arithomancers and alchemists. Among the greatest witches and wizards of their age, every single year. But with that greatness came a greater amount of risk-taking. Many of these risks paid off, earning the gold in family vaults. But others led to a backfire, or jealousy from rivals that paid in death.

Susan knelt in front of the most recent patch of graves. When her aunt was only twenty-three, a young legislator in the Ministry of Magic, working for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, she'd been forced to bury the majority of her family. Susan's grandparents, her many cousins, aunts and uncles, and even her parents all died when He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named came. He was the reason the once-great Bones manor was only cinders and ash and rotted wood.

When Susan was four, she learned the story.

Her mother's side of the family, and her mother, had already been killed by the Dark Lord's followers. Marlene McKinnon drew a public profile. She was a Gryffindor, brave and bold, in the Order of the Phoenix. Amelia said she laughed when she dueled, and she danced in a battle like she did with Susan's father in the Leaky Cauldron after their graduation.

Susan was too young to remember the September night, shortly after she was born, that Marlene went to visit Susan's maternal grandparents— alone— and did not return. The Bones Manor was under stricter safeguards, then.

They didn't know what happened, what Marlene told them— but the Death Eaters went marching for Bones Manor, and there was a rush about the home. The great sorcerers like Susan's father, Abraham, burned their research in the fires that consumed the house. They dueled the Death Eaters while the flames rose higher and higher, to delay when the followers of the Dark Lord would find the ashes an attempt to reconstruct secrets too terrible and too powerful for mortal men.

Susan was left out in the graves, with the other children. They fled, and were killed by the Death Eaters, more for sport than for anything else.

That part, Susan didn't learn until she was thirteen.

As Susan stared out at the graves now, she traced the death dates— October 27th, 1981. Only four days before the deaths of James and Lily Potter. Only two days after the deaths of the McKinnons.

All in a row were the children and parents, together in death.

These were the only graves in the plot that didn't list whatever mistake led them to be dead. There was no mistake made. No accident.

That's what she used to tell others. That her parents, her family, they died in an accident involving the creation of magical fire. It was less painful. Of course, no one believed her. Megan Jones even drew her aside to tell her so personally.

"We all know the truth, Susan," Megan said, whispering as she drew the bed curtains around them. "It's in the papers. You-Know-Who's people killed them."

"It doesn't suit them," Susan told her. "It doesn;t suit my family."

"Death doesn't suit anyone," Megan said, brushing a strand of hair out of her face. She tugged at the tie— a Gryffindor tie that belonged to her sister.

"But my family, they die by their own hands, or caused their deaths somehow," Susan explained. "A potion went wrong, or they created the very spell used in a duel to kill him— something romantically tragic of that nature. They die because of their mistakes— not because they did everything right, and it doesn't matter."

But it didn't matter.

That was what troubled Susan as she set down flowers over her parents' grave— her mother's body was actually in the McKinnon plot in Godric's Hollow, but her father requested that there be a gravestone bearing her name in the Bones family plot. Thus, they shared a stone.

_Abraham Bones and Marlene McKinnon_

_1961-1981_

"_The second brother died for love."_

Susan smiled sadly at the inscription. From "The Three Brothers." The tale that was about her family.

Love was not a mistake to be condemned. Susan stood and her eyes wandered to the cliffs, with the wildflowers growing upon them, at the edge of the graveyards. She wandered past it, and Amelia did not bother to call her back, lost in her own mourning, her own remembrance for all who were dead and gone.

At the end of the graves was a beautiful place, where the waves crashed and Susan could lie down and led her red hair spill into the brightly-colored flowers.

Her parents had died for love, to let her live. Her entire family had died for that. They burned their work, the source of glory that the Bones family so greatly craved. Because love was worth more— and that could never be a mistake.

When she was first Sorted, Susan felt disappointed she had not made Ravenclaw, like the majority of her family, the great remnants of the Peverells.

But she had learned to value her parents sacrifice and the living. That was the end of the clumsiness— and the beginning of a new grace upon the Most Ancient and Noble House of Bones.


End file.
